On Specificity, 2012
Merve Ünsal, On Specificity, 2012. Installation and performance featuring video, artist book, and site-specific objects. Installation views from On Specificity at PiST/// Interdisciplinary Project Space, Istanbul, September 2012.
Merve Ünsal, On Specificity, 2012. Installation and performance featuring video, artist book, and site-specific objects. Installation views from On Specificity at PiST/// Interdisciplinary Project Space, Istanbul, September 2012.
Cover of the artist book Production!, published in an edition of 100.
Commissioned as part of Open for Installation at PiST/// Interdisciplinary Project Space, On Specificity was launched at the exhibition space on September 26, 2012. The work was the third and final part of my “Production!” series—a project that she started in New York in 2011, which was structured as a three-word sentence, ending with this text functioning as an adverb. The first part, On/For Production, traces production by looking at the permeability of self-enclosure. The second text, Underproduction, is a confession and proclamation of its very title. And the third looks for artistic production in the potentialities of language to think about how production is executed.
The text that was brought into PiST/// to be workshopped in a group setting. It then became an exercise of non-translatability, which I performed for the camera. The text broke down when the group started to work on it , which became the material for a different performance. At the resulting exhibition, an artist book featuring the three texts from the series, two videos that documented the performance of the text were installed, complemented by the artist adding an “un-“ in front of the specificity in the 100 copies of the artist book during the opening.
